Much has been said about the recent US Presidential debate on Tuesday, 10 September 2024, and Donald Trump’s woeful performance demonstrates that AI-generated misinformation continues to be the least of our concerns.
Vice President Harris clearly understood her opponent well, baiting former President Trump into incoherent ramblings.
Since the debate, his unfounded assertions have continued, later assuring a crowd in Arizona that he won that debate, contrary to polling from Reuters.
This has already been written about, but with each new prompt that the changing course of events provides us, new opportunities for analysis present themselves. The specific phenomenon that is President Trump presents us with one such opportunity.
Trustable Trump
A poll conducted by CBS News and YouGov released very telling findings on August 20 about Trump’s position in the lives of his supporters.
One key finding was that 71% trust him to tell them the truth, more than friends and family (63%), conservative media (56%), or religious leaders (42%). As the Washington Post highlights, these findings are stunning, considering the more than 30,000 false and misleading claims made by President Trump during his time in office.
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By GlobalDataWhat this means regarding misinformation is that it is one of those things that doesn’t necessarily need AI’s help to make it any more potent. Technology has certainly played a role in the general proliferation of misinformation in our political spaces. The reach that the deadly smartphone-social media-mobile data combination has is undeniable, but fake AI-generated images or audio simply aren’t necessary.
As has been said before, it doesn’t matter how realistic a piece of media is; if the message behind the media is agreeable to certain people, especially at a highly politically charged time, then they’ll believe it.
AI isn’t helping to quell misinformation
Of course, that AI isn’t necessary for the advancement of information hasn’t stopped people from trying to use it. However, counterproductively, it is actually proving to be a hindrance to its serious dissemination.
If Trump wanted to claim that Harris is a dangerous Marxist, then he could simply say so and plenty would believe him. However, he and his supporters have decided to post AI-generated images of Harris as some sort of communist leader in the style of Mao or Lenin as some sort of warning of what would happen under a Harris presidency.
That these images are such obvious fictions is not what makes them damaging to the Trump cause. It is that they are such obvious fictions made to look real, or at least possible, that is so damaging
This shows that AI-generated content, with its characteristic inaccuracy and unrealistic plastic-like sheen, is, at this time, a detriment to the believability of misinformation. Only the least media-literate individuals could possibly believe that such images are real or that such claims about Harris are true. Everyone else recognises this use of AI as being a remarkably odd use of resources and political capital. One might call it weird, in fact.
